Load Balancers: Simplifying High Availability

Over the past five years, we've seen our community grow by leaps and bounds, and we've grown right alongside it. More and more of our users are managing complex workloads that require more resilience and need to be highly available. Our Floating IPs already enable you to implement an architecture that eliminates single points of failure, but we knew we could do better by bringing our "DO-Simple" approach to the problem.

So today, we are releasing Load Balancers—a fully managed, highly available service that you can deploy as easily as a Droplet.

Our goal is to provide simple and intuitive tools that let your team launch, scale, and manage production applications of any size. With our Load Balancers, just choose a region and which Droplets will receive the traffic. We take care of the rest.

Load Balancers cost $10/month [note: edited November 5, 2018, from $20/month] with no additional bandwidth charges and are available in all DigitalOcean regions.

Simplified Service Discovery

Your Load Balancer will distribute incoming traffic across your Droplets, allowing you to build more reliable and performant applications by creating redundancy. You can add target Droplets to a Load Balancer by either choosing specific Droplets, or choosing a tag used by a group of Droplets.

With tags, scaling your application horizontally becomes easy. Launch a new Droplet with the tag applied, and it will be automatically added to your Load Balancer's backend pool, ready to receive traffic. Remove the tag, and the Droplet will be removed from the backend pool.

If you're configuring a Load Balancer instance to use SSL termination, keep in mind that any Droplet using Shared Private Networking connected to the Load Balancer will have traffic sent to its private IP. Otherwise, it will use the Droplet's public IP. (For full control and end-to-end encryption, choose the "SSL passthrough" option.)

Load Balancers are just the beginning. Our 2017 roadmap is focused on bringing the "DO-Simple" experience to more complex, production workloads. Your feedback will help us as we improve Load Balancers and roll out more features, including new storage, security, and networking capabilities. Let us know what you think in the comments!